Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2009/01/15/launchpad-agplv3.html

Last week, I asked Karl
Fogel, Canonical’s newly hired Launchpad Ombudsman, if Launchpad
will use
the AGPLv3.
His eyes said “yes” but his words were something like:
Canonical hasn’t announced the license choice yet. I was excited
to learn this morning from him
that Launchpad’s
license will be AGPLv3.

This is exciting news. Launchpad is precisely the type of application
that we designed the AGPLv3 for, and Launchpad is rapidly becoming a
standard in the next generation of Free Software project hosting. Over
the last year, I’ve felt much trepidation that Launchpad would be
“another SourceForge”: that great irony of a proprietary
platform becoming the canonical method for Free Software project
hosting. It seems now the canonical and the Canonical method
for hosting will be Launchpad, and it will respect the freedom of
network users of the service.

Given
that they’d already announced plans to liberate Launchpad, it’s not
really surprising that Canonical has selected the AGPLv3. I would guess
their primary worry about releasing the source was ensuring that
competitors don’t sprout up and fail to share their improvements back
with the community of users. AGPLv3 is specifically designed for this
situation.

I’m glad we’ve made a license that is getting adoption by top-tier
Free Software projects like this one. Critics keep saying that AGPLv3
is a marginal license of limited interest. I hope this license choice
by Canonical will show them again that they continue to be mistaken.

Thanks to Karl, Matthew Revell, Mark Shuttleworth himself, and all the others at Canonical who are
helping make this happen.